Scanline overlay for 360 Shoot'em ups and XBLA Arcade games

[Fudoh]

I've posted this before on the shmups.com board, but I guess it might interest a few people over here as well. A while back I got my Blackmagic videocapture unit (Multibridge) and now I finally got around to give it a try. Capture quality is outstanding just like expected though the BDM cards can't accept any kind of 240p (not even from a PS2), so in order to capture the "classics" you need a 720p upscaler up front.

The BDM cards and machines have a Live Key function which allows you to choose a picture files (via windows or OSX frontend) and the machine will key (overlay) it over the incoming signal. The signal can't be captured this way, but the output of the card/unit will deliver a live-keyed version of the input. There's no lag whatsoever involved and it works great with PS2 (480i games) and XBox360 (720p) games.

One might argue if that's neccessary, but what the hell - it just closes the gap. The XRGB series can do scanline emulation for 240p sources and CRT-emulation for 480i games. This solution won't handle 240p (without upscaling upfront), but it can do 240p-style scanlines on 480i games (think about Gradius or Contra on WiiWare or Sengoku Blade on PS2) and on 720p ports on the 360 (DDPBLEX or DeathSmiles).

A few pictures:

Classic low-res version of DeathSmiles:


360 Hi-res version of DeathSmiles:


Reduced Scanline density (1-100 adjustable in the LiveKey frontend):


Custom background overlay with semi-transparent scanlines in the middle section:

[RGB32E]

WOW, that's awesome... So you got the Multibridge PRO model?
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/multibridge/

So, you have the PCI Express connection to your PC to setup the scanline overlay, right?  Also, are you connecting from your PC's output to your X3500, or from the HDMI output on the multibridge pro?

[Fudoh]

Yes, I have the Multibridge Pro.

Actually neither nor, my processing path is: 360 via HDMI -> MB Pro via HD-SDI -> 50pro via HDMI-> X3500, but that's out of convenience only. I could connect the MB Pro to the TV directly via HDMI as well. The PCIe connection to the PC is just used to control the MB Pro and to load the overlay graphics (you can even do video overlays by the way) into the MB Pro.

The included capture and preview tool is crappy, but I'm using iuVCS and and it's really 100% lagfree as well. This comes in handy for people who want to record their live-play and don't have the TV and the PC next to each other. The Keying functions works on the MB Pro's output only though, this means I can't record a scanlined picture. I can record the original picture though while applying a scanline overlay to the MB's output signal.